Walk­ing on wa­ter? Why would you want to?

That other fel­low did it quite a long time ago, and now it’s hor­ri­bly bor­ing.

Swim­ming in air… now, that’s a dif­fer­ent story. Much bet­ter than float­ing. Float­ing would be cool, if oth­ers would­n’t be so weirded out by it.

No-one finds swim­ming strange, though, which you think is quite odd, what with the weird con­tor­tions one must en­act to stay afloat.

Swim­ming is dan­ger­ous. Suf­fo­ca­tion is a real dan­ger. Same when swim­ming through air. More than one per­son has man­aged to die in the at­tempt.

You have to be care­ful. You’re swim­ming–you’re not go­ing to fall, or any­thing–but there’s still a very strong and very real dan­ger.

You must be care­ful lest you for­get how to breathe the air. The trick is re­mem­ber­ing that the air is not wa­ter.

Which is pretty dif­fi­cult, ac­tu­ally. If the air is air, how could you swim through it?

Du­al­ity. It’s what–

Sigh. They’re ask­ing you a ques­tion.

“Yes. And No. Equally. And un­equally. Al­to­gether and not at all.”

It’s per­fectly ob­vi­ous. You don’t know why they’re in an up­roar.

It’s all the same thing.

“Yes, he killed her, but no, he did­n’t.”

They don’t re­al­ize that air is wa­ter. You can swim through it, like wa­ter.
Or else, they re­al­ize that it is wa­ter, but now are drown­ing, as they have for­got­ten it is also air.

Ei­ther or the other is not enough–one way you’ll never fly; the other, you’ll die.

“The as­sasin is one half. He may have pulled the trig­ger, but some­one else called the shots.”

That brings them all up short.

This brings them all up short. “What trig­ger?” they ask.

You keep a straight face.

“You mean you did­n’t no­tice the gap­ing bul­let hole through her chest?”